The End of College Life

[Celerity]

If they persist, Donald Trump’s attacks on universities will destroy a cornerstone of American life.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/end-of-college-life/682241/

https://archive.ph/wv1OB



The start of spring semester is a hopeful time on college campuses. Students fill the quads and walkways, wearing salmon shorts or strappy tank tops. Music plays; frisbees fly. As a career academic, I have been a party to this catalog-cover scene for more than 30 years running. It looks made-up, but it is real. Every year in the United States, almost 20 million people go to college, representing every race, ethnicity, and social class. This is college in America—or it has been for a long time.

But college life as we know it may soon come to an end. Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.” In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies “an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.”

Those assessments are correct, but they’re also incomplete. So are the many paeans to the social and economic benefits of university research that schools have posted in the past two months. Yes, academic freedom is at stake, along with scientific progress. But the government’s attacks also threaten something far more tangible to future college students and their parents. The entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools—the brochure-ready college life that you may once have experienced yourself, and to which your children may aspire—is itself at risk of ruination.

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[Initech]

1. We fucking told you this was going to happen!

Fuck Trump and fuck TPUSA! TPUSA is a cancer on academic life, they must go.

[Srkdqltr]

2. Maybe they will have to defund the football teams??

No they wont.

[sakabatou]

3. Felon47 and the rest of the QOP believe the axiom that it's easier to control idiots than the intelligent

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. US "College" will become an extended high school: a haven for jocks, wanna-be alphas & trad-wive-wannabes

Other countries (hint hint Canada ) can benefit and end up with more vibrant universities.

Plus, foreign students bring dollars into the US, helping the US with its balance of payments. Watch that dry up.

[sop]

6. Trump loves the poorly educated...

[spanone]

7. He's literally destroying America.

[CitizenZero]

8. Good Article

University Life is so important.

[bucolic_frolic]

9. In the Digital Age, Entrepreneurship beckons

If I had it to do over again, I'd do 2 years of skills, work, then return for knowledge. When college is teaching you nothing, drop out. It's not all it's cracked up to be. You're as likely to be a CEO rising through the corporate ranks because of college as to be a professional basketball player, and you're in for decades of rat race and answers to the man. As a dropout, skill building smart phone debutante, you can form your own products and control your own destiny and own every penny. I sure would counsel anyone to try to achieve a blend of the two tracks. One may fail, and one is very expensive. Education is also an elitist system. It's not for plumbers, waitresses, and blue collar careers. Yet we embrace it. We pursue knowledge but we've wound up pursuing money every bit as much as any Republican. We court wealthy suburbs for good educations, but preach egalitarianism and economic populism. Those are a lot of parts that don't fit together very well.

[rickyhall]

10. Raygun stopped mine almost the same way in the summer of 81.

[JanMichael]

11. They took what happened to New College and took it national

If I was a foreign students I wouldn't come here for anything. If I was 18 I'd go to another country.

These people are scourge on Civilization.